Dear Hollywood Directors

You are the writers of the future, well, technically the directors, but you make the writer's visions come to life on the big screen.

With great power comes great responsibility -- quote whomever you please on this, you understand it.

You reach millions of minds with the images you choose to place in your movies, and there is one place where I think you should be much more conscious about your decisions.

Now, don't get me wrong, I fully understand that the goal of most of you is to make as much money as possible. For those of you who care about influencing people in a positive manner as well, please continue.

(Assumption: Life on other planets may exist, and if indeed it does, their technology is inevitably vastly superior to our own.)

Terminator, Independence Day, Aliens, Signs and most recently Prometheus, along with countless others have all portrayed aliens as creatures that want to destroy humanity. Actually, next to ET, there hasn't been a single serious mainstream picture about life outside Earth that doesn't want to destroy us. (Thank you, Steven.)

At surface level, you're right, who cares?

They might not exist, they might. We really have no hard proof right now, so it's not worth arguing over. It is, however, fun to hypothesize...

Soooo... if they do exist and come here when we fully expect them to be hostile, some crazy extremist in the Middle East is going to launch a nuke at them before we even have a chance to make actual contact. Now, they most likely have the technology to freeze a nuke in its path, isolate the sender, differentiate him and all the other crazies from the general population with a personality-analyzation probe, and move on with talking to the rational ones among us. However, there is a chance they might take offense to the nuke and kill us all, ruining our chance to become intergalactic players!

We have more than enough things to be scared of today, and we do a great job making sure that everyone is aware of what's going south. The economy is going to collapse! I'll never have a job! Nuclear fallout in Japan! Global warming!

Why do we need to throw in aliens? Why can't we give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they'll be nice and help us evolve? Truth is we don't really have a choice. Similar to how quickly robots would wipe us out if they had that prerogative, a species that has conquered interstellar travel most likely would have no trouble flipping us upside down with a single button.

Back to my point, directors: you guys need to stop scaring the people. Aliens are not going to kill us, and if they are, nothing we can do, so why incite fear that's paralyzing and misleading until then? You give people nightmares, stop it. Bad directors!

Create something beautiful that inspires a child to want to go into space, not fear that black goo will attack them and turn them into seven different species of alien/worm/octopus... (did anyone see Prometheus?)

Anyway, you're more creative than scary alien bad guys, and it's been played, soooooo played... lalala...

Seinfeld anyone? Yeah, it's been a long week.

Follow Zach Puchtel on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ZachPuchtel